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Updating Dante’s Inferno
How to perform a makeover on one of literature’s former gems
Let’s face it, Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia has had a good run. Longer than Agatha Christie’s execrable The Mousetrap, longer than Andrew Loyd Webber’s foremost crime against human decency Cats, and longer than the King James Bible. But in recent years it’s not aged well and thus it is somewhat overdue for what in the unrelenting vulgarity of modern parlance would be termed “a makeover.”
As those of us who’ve read the relevant Wikipedia entry will know, the Divina Commedia is a medieval poem written in Tuscan dialect and shaped by the Roman Catholic version of Christian mythology, which is a misshapen mashup of the myths that preceded it both on the rather unkempt Judaic side of the fence and on the well-tended Greco-Roman lawn opposite. There are, as the cognoscenti are well aware, nine circles of damnation within which at the very center is nestled Christianity’s slanderous misrepresentation of Pan/Bacchus, now appellated Lucifer/the Devil/Satan etc.
In the first third of his epic poem, which he commenced in 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321, Dante travels through each circle in turn, descending ever further into the darkness of the underworld.
